In our world, to work is to exist. At least that’s what I tell myself whenever I find myself lugging wheelbarrows full of crushed rock from one end of a yard to the other at 7am on a Tuesday morning. It seems like a strange job, when one examines the implications of putting down something as ordinary as rock in someone else’s garden so they can later show it off to others as a symbol of their own success and hard work. Such an analysis shows the hierarchy of the situation: that person is not only successful enough to have a wonderful garden, but to have the luxury of paying others to move their barrows of crushed rock for them. They’ve worked so hard that at this point, they’re beyond hard work. What a life.
Of course, in this whole scenario, the job of moving and then arranging glorified pebbles isn’t the strangest occupation imaginable. Consider, for a moment, the life of the man whose job it is to crush those rocks, or pluck those rocks from the earth to be crushed, or to choose which rocks would look lovely in a garden after being decimated into tiny remnants of their former selves. Such jobs seem to me like the work not of men but of minor deities, at least in terms of responsibility. I don’t think I could ever be comfortable with such an arrangement; I would just find myself feeling sorry for the rocks.
That’s not to say, however, that my capacity for weird jobs is limited to picking up small bits of stone from one place and moving them to another. I have had a whole plethora of odd experience. For a ten month stint a few years ago I was a butler for a very wealthy 104 year old woman living on the top floor of a rather upscale hotel just outside of Boston. My tenure with Mrs. Kirshner was not ended by her death, as one may expect, but by an argument I had with her rather confrontational daughter, June, after I had allegedly lost Mrs. Kirshner's slippers. They were later found in the backseat of June’s car.
Before beginning my tenure with Mrs. Kirshner, I held a temporary job at a prestigious University in Somerville. I was hired as a “Security Technician”, a job which required me to walk through each of the University’s twenty-six buildings while they were unoccupied and check the accuracy of the floor plans. The most important part was to make sure that every door in the floor plan would swing open in the way indicated on the chart I was given. The purpose of this endeavor was to ensure that, in the event of a hostage situation, a State Police sniper would know where to aim his weapon when dealing with any given door on the campus of this prestigious institution of higher learning. One would surely expect that I had some knowledge of architecture, or training in security planning to be selected for such a position. However I did not have any of that, and was hired solely on the basis that I didn’t mind spending the summer of 2006 walking through the empty buildings with endless floor charts, opening hundreds of doors to ensure that they did, in fact, swing open in the correct direction.
Over the course of that summer I found seven mistakes on the University’s floor plans, read fifteen books rented from the University’s library, and made exactly one friend. Alvin was a janitor on the North side of campus who would occasionally bring an extra donut to work for me and thought it was fascinating that people actually used GPS devices while driving. In the world Alvin grew up in, everyone just tried their best to make it to where they had to go, and if they needed directions, they asked at a local gas station or coffee shop. Him pointing out things like this contributed to my ever increasing cynicism towards the changing landscape of our society. The GPS itself represents a world where people care only about the destination and disregard the value of the journey. Such thoughts make my brain feel sore and tired, a feeling I truly detest.
It was realizations such as this that led me back to my landscaping job. Here I can be sore of body, but rarely sore of mind. There is honesty in this work, and even when I don’t know where my next job site is, I never use a GPS to get there. I trust that the roads will lead me where they are supposed to, and take in all I see as I daydream about the day when I can pay someone else to make my yard look good enough to show off to the neighborhood. I don’t think I’ll ever have the heart to use crushed rocks though. No matter how much of a big shot I become, I refuse to take the role of someone who sentences something as indestructible as a rock to its demise. I believe in Karma.
